This is the only surviving group portrait of the three famous novelist sisters - from left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë. The portrait was known from a description of it by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell who saw it in 1853. It was thought to have been lost until it was discovered folded up on top of a cupboard by the second wife of Charlotte Brontë's husband, the Reverend A.B. Nicholls, in 1914. In the centre of the group a male figure, previously concealed by a painted pillar, can now be discerned; it is almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist, their brother Branwell Brontë.